The significance and importance of this project is the example it will produce of how to help students understand the nature of scientific investigation and the basic concepts of evolution. It will also help a dedicated group of faculty develop effective approaches for actively engaging students in their own education. The project will engage students in use of a diverse set of methods of inquiry in evolutionary biology to study the bases for change in hammerhead sharks in terms of evolution, structure/function, and information flow. The approach will be embedded across all four academic years of study from an introductory biology course to a senior year capstone course. The project will improve students' acquisition of important concepts across important sub-disciplines in evolutionary biology. Students completing multiple courses in the sequence will have cutting-edge experience with evolutionary concepts. Students completing two or more elective courses in the sequence will be eligible for a semester-long capstone research project.
The goals and scope of the project are to improve the teaching of evolution across the biology curriculum at this institution, to engage a majority of the faculty in doing so and to disseminate the effects of doing so to the general biology community. Activities geared to engaging students in studies of fitness and phenotypic performance focusing on development and refinement of hammerhead shark cephalofoils will serve as the initial core of the project and will be expanded as the project proceeds to include studies of other organisms. These activities will be introduced first at the introductory level (the second semester of introductory biology) and then will be threaded throughout lower-level biology courses and upper level electives. New techniques being used to enable these studies include use of a 3-D printer to produce shark models, computer simulations, and genetic sequencing to cultivate a broad understanding of key evolutionary concepts. Many of the studies enabled by the newly acquired equipment are new to Armstrong State University. The specific project activities will: 1. emphasize and reinforce a continuous theme of structure and function through inquiry-based instruction of evolution, genotype, phenotype, and natural selection; 2. engage students in 3D scanning, 3D printing, computer simulations, genetic sequencing, molecular modeling, and bioinformatics; and 3. build a continuous thread of student involvement and instruction, starting with the required courses of Introductory Biology II and Genetics and continuing through upper-level electives including Evolution, Epigenetics, Bioinformatics, and Functional Morphology.
This project is funded jointly by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education in support of efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Education: A Call to Action http://visionandchange.org/finalreport/
